Trump turns Iran strike intel into loyalty test

‘Severely damaged.’ The CIA assesses that “Iran’s nuclear program has been severely damaged by the recent, targeted strikes,” CIA Director John Ratcliffe said.

President Trump on Wednesday appeared to be strong-arming the U.S. intelligence community as well as Israel to provide confirmation for his claim that U.S. strikes on Saturday had “totally obliterated” three Iran nuclear sites, even as he seemed at times to be tentatively walking back the claim to something less hyperbolic.

“The original word that I used—I guess it got us in trouble…was ‘obliteration,’” Trump told journalists at the NATO Summit in the Hague on Wednesday. “And it’s going to come out, Israel is doing a report on it, I understand.”

Sure enough, a few hours later, the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. forwarded reporters a three-sentence statement from the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office that was attributed to Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC):

“The devastating U.S. strike on Fordow destroyed the site’s critical infrastructure and rendered the enrichment facility inoperable,” the Israel Atomic Energy Commission/Israel PMO statement said. “We assess that the American strikes…combined with Israeli strikes….have set back Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons by many years.”

“The achievement can continue indefinitely if Iran does not get access to nuclear material,” it continued.

Around the same time, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard claimed in a tweet that “new intelligence confirms what @POTUS has stated numerous times: Iran’s nuclear facilities have been destroyed.”

CIA Director John Ratcliffe then chimed in with a statement saying the “CIA can confirm that a body of credible intelligence indicates Iran’s Nuclear Program has been severely damaged by the recent, targeted strikes.”

“This includes new intelligence from an historically reliable and accurate source/method that several key Iranian nuclear facilities were destroyed and would have to be rebuilt over the course of years,” the CIA Director’s statement, posted in a screenshot to Twitter, continued.

Neither the Gabbard nor the Ratcliffe statements indicated if the new intelligence they were describing came in part from the Israelis.

Gabbard, Ratcliffe and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine had been due to give classified briefings on the Iran strikes to the House and Senate on Tuesday, but the administration postponed the briefings until Thursday. The postponement led some lawmakers to express the suspicion that the administration was embarrassed by a Defense Intelligence Agency preliminary report that assessed the U.S. strikes had damaged Fordow but probably not destroyed some Iranian centrifuges and nuclear infrastructure there.

“They don’t delay briefings that have good news,” Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Illinois), a member of the House intelligence committee, told the Washington Post.

The administration may also have wanted to have more pugilistic loyalists like Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth attending the rescheduled Hill briefings on Thursday, to spin and litigate the intelligence assessments to lawmakers more than the intelligence community briefers and joint chiefs chairman were likely to do, a Hill source suggested.

Hegseth and military representatives will hold a briefing at the Pentagon Thursday morning “in order to fight for the Dignity of our Great American Pilots,” Trump said in a Truth Social Post.

“We were all worried that the administration would twist the intelligence to justify a BIG WAR with Iran, but actually they are twisting the intelligence to emphasize that his small war was bigly successful,” Iran economics analyst Esfandyar Batmanbhelidj wrote on Twitter. “Very on brand for Trump.”

But the current White House rosy assessments that the Iran nuclear issue has been permanently solved are not likely to last.

Former top European Union Iran nuclear negotiator Enrique Mora warned Wednesday that the June 21st U.S. strikes on Iran could be a turning point that makes Iran forego efforts to try to reach a nuclear deal with the United States, and possibly decide it needs to obtain nuclear weapons.

“This unprecedented strike has shown, for the second time, the Islamic regime that nuclear diplomacy is reversible, fragile and vulnerable to changes in leadership in Washington,” Mora wrote in Spain’s Politica Exterior magazine. “There will not be a third time.”

“If Iran now decides to move towards a bomb, it will do so following a clear strategic logic,” he wrote. “No one bombs the capital of a nuclear-armed country. June 21, 2025 may go down in history not as the day the Iranian nuclear program was destroyed, but as the day a nuclear Iran was irreversibly born.”

(Photo: Pres. Trump speaking at a press conference at the end of the NATO summit flanked by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, in The Hague, Netherlands, on Wednesday, June 25, 2025. AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

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